2026 ELWAY NFL projections

Models & Forecasts

2026 ELWAY NFL projections: Week 8

Team ratings, playoff and Super Bowl odds, and forecasts of every upcoming game from Silver Bulletin's exclusive NFL model.

Nate Silver

,

Joseph George

,

and

Eli McKown-Dawson

Nov 02, 2026

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🏈 The latest on ELWAY

November 2, 2026

ELWAY has been updated with Sunday’s games. Minnesota’s unbeaten start ended in Detroit, where the Lions won 19-15 behind 153 rushing yards from Jahmyr Gibbs, moving to 5-2. Buffalo improved to 6-1 by routing Baltimore 36-10, while Denver beat Kansas City 28-24 to reach 6-2, dropping the Chiefs to 5-2. Cincinnati needed overtime to survive Tennessee 43-36 despite 462 passing yards from Joe Burrow, and Arizona beat Dallas 33-30 in the day’s other overtime game. Jacksonville supplied the biggest blowout, beating Indianapolis 42-7. New England erased a 13-3 halftime deficit to beat Miami 24-19 and improve to 5-3, while Washington closed the night with a 27-10 win over Philadelphia, sending the Eagles to 2-6.

October 30, 2026

ELWAY has been updated with Thursday night’s game. Green Bay scored 21 unanswered points after falling behind 10-6 and held off a late Carolina push for a 27-19 win at Lambeau Field. Jordan Love threw for 288 yards and three touchdowns, Josh Jacobs scored twice (once on the ground, once through the air), and Christian Watson, who left the stadium in an ambulance for a chest evaluation in the second quarter, came back to finish with eight catches for 113 yards (perhaps the closest we’ve gotten to the WWE in professional sports this year). The Packers improved to 5-3, while the Panthers fell to 3-4 but are still tied with Atlanta for the NFC South lead. Carolina forced three turnovers but turned them into only three points, and Bryce Young (23-of-41, 209 yards) was under pressure all night as the Green Bay defense recorded six sacks.

-NS & JG, 11/02/2026

See also:

QBERT quarterback ratings

.

Despite football’s reputation for being less analytics-friendly than basketball or baseball, there is a

lot

of data to work with. The NFL is now in its 107th season. There’s now a quarter-century’s worth of reliable play-by-play data (since 2001) and 20 years (since 2006) of advanced quarterback tracking stats.

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But it can take a bit of creativity to use that data effectively. ELWAY

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is probably Silver Bulletin’s most unique model. You can read more about it on the

methodology page

, but let’s get to the numbers.

The best (and worst) teams in the NFL

Let’s begin with our topline team ratings. A team’s offensive and defensive ratings represent, respectively, their projected number of points scored and allowed on a neutral site against an average opponent

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and can be combined to form a net rating. The Bills’ net rating of +6.0 means that we’d expect them to outscore an average opponent by 6 points in Week 2, for example.

The comparison between offense and defense is also instructive. The relationship between offense and defense is complicated in the NFL because efficient offenses not only score more but leave their opponents with worse field position and take more time off the clock. Put another way, “the best defense is a good offense.” This means that teams that score more points tend to allow fewer points, and vice versa. However, there are some outliers on either side. The Texans’ strengths are particularly concentrated on defense, whereas the Cowboys have a great offense behind Dak Prescott but really struggle on the other side of the ball, as the Giants exposed last week.

The rest of this page contains:

Projected W-L records for each team, including a new, detailed chart that shows the probability distribution of each team’s win totals (how likely is it that the Ravens win 11 or more games?) across 20,000 simulations.

Playoff, division title and Super Bowl odds, including conditional odds showing the effect on a team’s playoff chances from winning or losing its next game.

Detailed projections for every game of the regular season, with projected point spreads, totals (i.e. over/unders) and win probabilities for each game. There’s also a separate chart showing a distribution of simulated margins: 3-point wins and 7-point wins are particularly common, for instance.

Finally, we’ll add a series of graphs that track each team’s ELWAY rating from week to week, though we’ve left these off for now since we’re so early in the season.

The remaining features are for paid subscribers. A paid subscription also includes full access to our 2026

midterm election forecast

when you sign up for ELWAY.

ELWAY projected records and playoff odds

Here’s what you were probably waiting for: our simulated standings based on playing out the rest of the season 20,000 times, along with each team’s odds of reaching the playoffs, winning its division and winning the Super Bowl. You can also click over to the “playoff seed probabilities” tab to see a team’s likelihood of finishing with the #1 through #7 seed in each conference. The projected standings account for strength of schedule and both current and future injury risk.

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